DUE to the influence of the highly unique Venezuelan experience, we have witnessed the advance of progressive forces across the continent.

Today, when the absence of Hugo Chavez is most felt, his importance is even more appreciated.

But it’s not just individuals who matter. Systems do, too. The empire — the US — has always operated to stop the emergence of the Latin American peoples.

There have been military dictatorships, the expansion of the transnational corporations and neoliberalism and the political “spring” with Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil changing the face of the continent.

But due to internal and external factors, we are now in a situation where we have taken one step back. Yet this is no triumph of reaction. History is a struggle, a complex and long-term dialectic — even the triumphs are short-lived and one must know how to accumulate the forces for the next two steps forward.

These steps must be taken because as the No vote on a peace deal in Colombia demonstrated, the people have become disoriented.

In the case of Argentina, the people voted for Mauricio Macri and in large part are already regretful and suffering the consequences. The same thing is going to happen in Brazil.

Sometimes, deceived by the press and by illusions, people have to confront reality and suffer the inevitable.

Of course, those who saw the danger and were against it suffer most but so do those who allowed themselves to be fooled by the smoke and mirrors. Those governing in Argentina and Brazil have not triumphed — such victories are always very fragile.

But the left must accept that they have committed errors and that there has been corruption.

Militants — disciplined, frugal and combative while working at the grassroots — allowed themselves to be corrupted when in positions of power that offer a high salary. They’d buy a car and move to a new house. We must be very careful not repeat those errors.

So the next two steps forward have much to do with the need for a cultural revolution, a deep revolutionary change in the minds and souls of the people.

We have retained a certain interpretation of reality which, though it may seem attractive, is ultimately a prison.

What we are rediscovering now is a tradition of critical thought in Latin America that began 40 years ago, based on much earlier writings of Jose Carlos Mariategui and Jose Marti.

But when we proposed a Latin American philosophy of liberation, it was described as “anecdotal.” The professors at our universities, educated in the US and Europe, saw it as a product of ignorance, not of an indigenous Latin American culture.

What we have in our minds is a Eurocentric interpretation of everything, so deep that its frightening.

The question arises: “How is it possible to see things in such a unilateral and European way, rejecting our very selves and justifying the domination that we have suffered?”

We must understand that the ultimate level of domination is a certain vision of the world and today what is needed is a decolonisation of philosophy, science and technology.

We have to recognise that our Latin American world is colonial and stop continuing to believe that from 1810 to 1820 we liberated ourselves from Spain and became independent, because we then fell in the hands of Britain and the US as part of a new neocolonial period.

As Mariategui and Marti said, it’s time for our second emancipation. We are in a suffocating colonial situation but much more subtle than before and much more efficient and ruthless in the extraction of our riches.

The Spanish robbed us of little things, now they will even steal our souls. And not even the left is immune to being colonised.

The task is difficult but we’ve already begun. The opposition to this Bolivarian Revolution is not only to that of a liberal-bourgeois political and economic conservatism. It’s colonial — historically, culturally and even spiritually.

Venezuela is experiencing a pretty grave crisis economically and socially and the burning question might be asked: “What use is philosophy for someone who’s hungry?”

It is, however, not a question of eating today but eating tomorrow. I consider philosophy to be so important that it bewilders me when I am asked what it’s good for. It serves to change the mind in order to see and understand what they are doing to us.

It is telling that even US citizens are completely disillusioned with what they’ve become. They go to Syria and they destroy it without even knowing where Syria is. Before, they destroyed Baghdad —the centre of a world culture, the cradle of modern mathematics, of astronomy.

In Aleppo, which they are now destroying, in the 8th century Arabs adopted Greek philosophy and changed the world. Baghdad is Mesopotamia, the place of origin of human culture.

But Bush, who is said to be Christian, destroyed it without knowing that he was destroying the cradle of the Bible.

Philosophy allows us to distinguish reality from the fantasies on offer, it allows us to grasp the essence of things — and that is at the origin of any revolution.

Chavez was a statesman who read and studied and, when he spoke, showed the books that he had read that week. What other president reads books of history and politics like Chavez did?

The opposition always attacked him with their Eurocentric atavism, describing themselves as Kantian, Hegelian or Habermasians, of whom they are merely flimsy imitators. 

Formalist, analytical philosophers of the English language have political and philosophical power in almost all of the philosophy departments on the planet.

They are not interested in the political, economic and psychological content of philosophy but only in its language — formalism without content.

There is a need to restore the myth-based philosophy of Latin American indigenous peoples.

Myths are rational, as my professor at the Sorbonne Paul Ricoeur used to tell us, and they provide justifications and advance arguments. Symbolic, though not unambiguous, they are great instruments of wisdom.

When you ask a shaman in a Quiche or Guahibo indigenous community what death is, he will answer with a myth that gives it meaning.

This is key because some, like the Greeks, the Hindus and the Indo-Europeans, would say that the body dies but the soul is immortal.

In contrast, the Semites, the Babylonians, the Palestinians and the Egyptians would say that the human being as a whole dies but is later resurrected.

Osiris, three centuries before the founding of Christianity and millennia before Marx and Engels, asked the dead: “What good have you done on this Earth?”

The dead person was expected to answer: “I gave food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothing to the naked and a boat to the pilgrim on the Nile.”

For Semites and for the founder of Christianity, feeding the hungry is the first obligation. That’s politics, economics, a concept of the world.

So the crisis in Venezuela presents itself in philosophical terms, between those who want to feed the people and those, who in the name Christianity, criticise a revolution that has given food to the hungry.

What really interests them is feeding capital and the real philosopher points up this contradiction.

This is not a critique of the past 12 to 15 years but of our entire world history of five millennia which is now at boiling point. Eurocentrism is coming to an end. China and India are beginning to grow and a multipolar world is coming into existence.

The situation will change but not tomorrow nor in the next two decades. It’s going to take most of 21st century.

Those who expect to see revolution in their lifetime are kidding themselves — revolutions go on for centuries.

Understand that or you won’t survive the process.

• Enrique Dussel is founder of the Philosophy of Liberation movement made up of key theorists and public intellectuals in the “pink tide” of left and centre-left governments that came to power across Latin America. This is a shorter version of an article translated, edited and abridged for Venezuela Analysis venezuelanalysis.com by Lucas Koerner.

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